The BBC's business case put the total DMI project investment, including its management and other administrative costs, at £81.7 million, and claimed that the project would end up generating a total benefit of £99.6 million. The benefit, the NAO indicated, would come from reduced operating costs, the avoidance of some future production costs, and a “creative dividend” savings that would accrue from being able to reuse material instead of having to produce entirely new content.

Aside from the billion or so 17-year brood cicadas which all seem to be singing directly outside my office window, it was very quiet last week in regard to IT-related snafus, problems and outages. We start off this week with the Royal Bank of Scotland, which can always be counted on to liven up a slow week.

This Time, RBS Mobile Banking App Fails

Two million customers of the UK government nationalized Royal Bank of Scotland and its subsidiaries, NatWest and the Bank of Ulster, were frustrated yet again by an IT problem. According to the BBC, customers were unable to log into their accounts through their mobile phone app for about two and half hours last Friday just before the long bank holiday started. RBS customers reported that the problems began around 7:15 a.m. London time. When they tried to access their bank accounts through the app, they received various error messages telling them that the app couldn't find an Internet connection even though other apps were working fine. The problem was fully cleared up by 1:00 p.m., the BBC stated.

Friday's failure was embarrassing not only because of Sir Phillip’s comments, but because about a week ago RBS announced that it was eliminating another 1400 jobs in its retail banking sector as part of its move to encourage its 17 million customers to move to online and mobile banking. The latest gaffe may instead encourage RBS customers to decide to move to a rival's online and mobile banking app.

RBS offered up an apology to its customers, who probably aren't listening anymore.

There were a couple of interesting IT-related snafus, errors, and problems last week. We start off this week’s edition of IT Hiccups with a popular polygraph system that may well have incorrectly identified thousands of people as being economical with the truth when they actually weren’t.

Lafayette LX4000 Polygraph System Accused of Minimizing “Technical Glitch” for Years

The McClatchy publishing company ran a series of disturbing stories in its papers over the weekend about a polygraph system called the Lafayette Instrument LX4000, which is widely used by U.S. state, local and federal law enforcement agencies, as well as the military and intelligence agencies. The articles note that the polygraph has had a long-standing “technical glitch” that may have incorrectly shown people as being untruthful when they were not.

How strong are your computer passwords? What influences whether you “secure” an account with a password such as “123456” or never even bother to change it from a default such as “Welcome1” after you’ve registered at a website? A team of researchers from University of California at Berkeley, the University of British Columbia, and Microsoft wanted to know whether the password strength meters more frequently seen on registration pages make a difference in what alphanumeric combinations registrants decide to use. In a paper (pdf) released this week, the researchers report the results of experiments designed to reveal the circumstances under which strong or weak passwords are used. The team wrote that, “meters result in stronger passwords when users are forced to change existing passwords on important accounts and that individual meter design decisions likely have a marginal impact.” But the flip side of that coin, unfortunately, is that when it comes to sites that users view as unimportant (when there is no sensitive information, like their bank balances, to keep hidden), they tend not to make the effort. In those instances, say the researchers, users all too frequently reused passwords from other accounts. What they fail to take heed to, say the researchers, is that regardless of a password’s relative strength, if it is used across several sites, all of a user’s accounts are at risk if a hacker breaks into one site’s poorly guarded password database. The problems with passwords are mostly attributable to “poor policies and…the frequencies we see of databases getting disclosed,” Serge Egelman, a UC Berkeley researcher who was a member of the research team, told Kaspersky Lab’s Threatpost. “If more work was done to secure stored encrypted passwords, less effort would need to be done on the users’ end.”

This past week saw a hodgepodge of ICT-related issues. We start off with a long-standing software error affecting the credit and debit cards of some unlucky postcode related TriMet transit passengers in Portland, Oregon.

Many legitimate purchasers of TriMet tickets have been feeling the effects of the fraudulent activity as well. For the past several years, a large number of TriMet transit riders have been complaining that when they used their credit or debit cards to purchase a ticket, the purchases were not only declined, but their banks put security freezes on their cards out of fear that they had been stolen. Sometimes the banks would even cancel the cards outright, another story in the Oregonian reported last week.

When riders complained to TriMet about the issue, transit officials told the riders that they needed to talk to their banks about it, not them. The Oregonian stated that, “TriMet assumed problems with riders having cards suspended and cancelled were the result of banks using proprietary fraud filters to stop thieves.”

A classic case of what Oscar Wilde said about assumptions: “When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.”

What was really behind the false positives? A software error in TriMet’s 215 ticketing machines was flagging the credit and debit cards of riders with a certain zip code as being stolen. This was happening 1000 to 2000 times a month over the past five years, Portland television station KATU reported. The error was finally discovered this January. “A data field was passing something other than TriMet's zip code, causing banks to flag the transactions as risky,” the Oregonian reported.

A TriMet official was quoted in the paper as saying, “After addressing [the error], fraud declines for credit cards users at our TVMs decreased significantly from 4 percent to 0.3 percent.”

TriMet issued a roundabout apology for the error, which was buried in a press release detailing the steps the transit agency is taking to reduce another issue angering its ridership, namely the notorious unreliability of its ticketing machines. TriMet suggests in its release that until machine reliability is improved (hopefully this summer), riders should not depend on the machines to purchase a single ticket at the station, but to instead carry a book of pre-bought tickets just in case.

Up to a Million Washington Residents Affected by Hack of State Court Network

It’s likely that most of the people charged with crimes in Washington State between September 2011 and December 2012 have already been exonerated or have paid their respective debts to society. But for roughly a million of them (at least some of whom were found not guilty at trial, established their innocence before their cases went that far—or were in court simply to fight a traffic ticket) that moment of contact with the state’s court system may lead to another punishment: identity theft. The state government revealed this week that the website for the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts was hacked and that the attacker may have gotten away with the names and social security numbers of anyone booked into a city or county jail in the state during that time. Officials also couldn’t rule out the possibility that some people charged in the state's superior court criminal system in 2011 or 2012, cited for driving under the influence between 1989 and 2011, or went to court for traffic-related offenses during that period might be at risk. The larger group's names and driver's license information may have been taken.

"The access occurred through a ‘back door' part of a commercial software product [Adobe Systems’ ColdFusion] we were using, and it is patched now," Mike Keeling, information technology operations and maintenance manager for the court system, told reporters on a conference call.

At the same time that state officials were offering up the usual assurances that no financial data such as credit card numbers was accessed as a result of the break-in, they revealed that the breach was discovered in February (and could have been exploited as early as last fall). Since then, the state has attempted to notify only the 94 people (that is not a typo) whose information they could absolutely confirm was taken. Of their delay in reporting the incident, the government employees insisted that they didn’t initially think any confidential personal details had been stolen—despite the fact that a large volume of data had been downloaded through the backdoor. "We regret that this breach has occurred and we have taken immediate action to enhance the security of these sites," Callie T. Dietz, the state’s court administrator, said in a written statement. Dietz also offered this fun fact: The break-in was the first time the court system’s network had been hacked. Hurray! Trophies and orange slices for everyone on the team!

You may recall that I recently wrote about the apparent success of New Hampshire’s new US $90 million Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) that went live last month after years of technical difficulties, cost overruns and delays. This was a bit of good news, given that implementations of state Medicaid/Medicare systems have a notoriously bad track record, as the project problems in Maine, Ohio and Idaho have illustrated.

Alas, the difficulty with implementing these systems was highlighted once more when late last month Tennessee announced that it was stopping work on its Vision Integration Platform (VIP) after seven years of development. According to a story in the Tennessean, the state’s Department of Human Services made only a very brief, content-free announcement about the reasons behind its termination decision on a Friday, apparently in the time-honored ploy to reduce the political impact of the news. Tennessee has had a number of high-profile IT state project problems over the past few years affecting the Department of Children’s Services, the Department of Labor and Workforce Development, as well as with the state’s attempt to implement its Project Edison payroll system.

The VIP project was to provide comprehensive automated support for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Food Stamps, Medicaid and TennCare, as well as other state supported programs. A February 2005 press release (pdf) from the state’s Department of Human Services said that the $37 million project would take be completed by the summer of 2008.

However, the VIP project has repeatedly missed its deadlines, with the latest being 1 April 2013. A 2012 Tennessee government audit report (pdf) blamed the missed deadlines on “defects in current designs or new functionality requirements,” the Tennessean reported. The state has spent in excess of US $20 million on the VIP project so far, and is now trying to figure out what to do next, such as to start over or to try to use what has been developed so far.

In mid-April, I wrote about how 15 000 Minnesota students who were trying to take their Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment online math test either couldn’t sign in or had their tests ended prematurely. The snag was because of a server issue at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), which the state had hired to run the testing. Those kids weren’t alone; more testing problems cropped up about a week later, frustrating the plans of several other Minnesota school districts, Minnesota Public Radio reported. However, a story at the Minneapolis StarTribune says that AIR is denying that the latter testing problems had anything to do with its system. Nevertheless, the ongoing online testing issues forced the state’s education officials to announce last week that they are pushing back the deadlines by which the exams have to be administered. The math and reading tests were to have been completed by May 10 and science tests by May 17. No new completion dates have yet to be set.

The Minnesota students having trouble taking their online tests apparently have lots of company. According to an Associated Press story, students in Oklahoma, Kentucky and Indiana also have had difficulties with their online tests. Other news reports highlighted testing issues in Ohio and Alabama. Again, server-related issues seemed to be a root cause. The problems in these states were similar to those experienced in Minnesota: students couldn’t log on, suffered slow response times, or were kicked off in the middle of their tests. Testing in Oklahoma and Indiana is run by CTB/McGraw-Hill; in Kentucky, ACT oversees the student assessments.

In Kentucky, the problems have caused state officials to suspend online testing for students who haven’t completed their tests and move back to the tried-and-true, paper-and-pencil approach. According to various news reports, state officials acted after ACT gave conflicting reports on the status of its testing system.

Researchers at security firm WhiteHat have some good news and some bad news. First the (sort of) good: for the third consecutive year, the number of serious vulnerabilities per website has gone down. But hold your applause, please. The average website was still a model of insecurity in 2012, with 56 holes.

To be sure, that's an improvement on the average of 79 per site in 2011 and an astonishing 230 per site in 2010. (By “serious vulnerability” WhiteHat means holes through which “an attacker could take control over all, or some part, of the website, compromise user accounts on the system, access sensitive data, violate compliance requirements, and possibly make headline news.”)

And now the bad news: Of the tens of thousands of sites the researchers looked at, 86 percent had least one serious vulnerability and a stunning 82 percent had a vulnerability that went unresolved for at least a full month. The most common vulnerabilities included: information leakage (55 percent of sites), cross-site scripting (53 percent), content spoofing (33 percent), and URL redirector abuse (13 percent).

Communication in a doctor's office is like a marriage gone bad: As you describe to your doctor that what pain or symptoms you have, you realize that while the doctor may hear you, he or she isn't really listening. And in the other direction, you hear the doctor's words, but do you walk away with a full understanding of the diagnosis, what exactly you're being prescribed, why, and what the risks are?

In a recent article in the London Telegraph, fully 25 percent of National Health Service patients complained that their doctors discuss their conditions as if they weren’t there; 20 percent reported that “they were not given enough information about their condition and treatment;” and 25 percent confessed that “there was no one they could talk to about their worries and fears.”

The WSJ article talks about how medical schools, malpractice insurers, and major hospitals are trying to improve patient-doctor communication, and for good reason: A break-down in patient-doctor communication is cited in at least 40 percent of malpractice claims. Further, research confirms that poor communication often leads patients to not follow their prescribed treatments regimens, whereas the opposite also seems to be true. Doctor-patient communication can be improved by having doctors coached in practices like the Four Habits, which, the WSJ says, “teaches doctors how to create rapport with patients, elicit their views, demonstrate empathy and assess their ability to follow a treatment regimen.”

If new technology is partly to blame, it can also help. An article at Health Management Technology describes the use of speech-based “virtual assistants” to capture patient data and automatically enter it into a patient’s EHR, for example, allowing the doctor to talk to the patient without the distraction of having to type what is being said.